All About Steve

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Published 5:30 am, Thursday, September 3, 2009

Thomas Haden Church, left, Sandra Bullock and Bradley Cooper star in All About Steve, a romantic comedy that lacks romance and comedy.

Thomas Haden Church, left, Sandra Bullock and Bradley Cooper star in All About Steve, a romantic comedy that lacks romance and comedy.

Photo: Suzanne Tenner, Fox

All About Steve

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Nothing against windbags or wackily dressed crossword-puzzle constructors, but I'm not sure a logorrheic cruciverbalist in go-go boots is someone I want to spend an hour and a half with in a darkened theater. In fact, I'm now dead sure she's not. Why, after just a few minutes with her, I wanted to steal the poor woman's shiny red footwear and use it to dropkick her straight back to the trash heap of bad movie ideas.

It pains me to say it, because I like Sandra Bullock. She's smart, unpretentious and perky, three characteristics many in Hollywood would be wise to emulate. I wanted to like All About Steve, too, and not merely because it co-stars hunk-of-the-hour Bradley Cooper as Bullock's unwilling love object. The notion of a crossword-puzzler as a film heroine appealed to my inner word-nerd, sparking hope for future epic dramas starring Scrabble champions and cryptogram fanatics. Sigh.

All About Steveis a drab name for a dreadful movie. A slightly better title might be “There's Something About Steve”— or even “All About Mary,” because director Phil Traill and writer Kim Barker only care about Steve to the extent that Mary's stalking him. Steve (Cooper) is the unfortunate fellow who shows up for a blind date with blabbermouthed Mary (Bullock), who's instantly smitten and jumps him like a rutting hyena in the cab of his truck.

He's OK with this until Mary starts talking nonstop, and he's even OK with that until she compares their sudden coupling to “two rare Earth elements brought together by the Norns — that's Scandinavian for the destinies.” End of sudden coupling. Start of Mary's new career stalking Steve, a cameraman for a cable news network who covers the disaster beat with an ego-crazed reporter (Thomas Haden Church) and harried producer (Ken Jeong, Cooper's castmate from The Hangover).

Trailing Steve is a fairly simple matter of pin-pointing the next crisis, which might be a hostage situation in Tucson or a mounting protest at a hospital in Oklahoma City, where parents are arguing over whether to amputate a baby's third leg. If that doesn't tickle your funny bone (birth defects: hilarious!), just wait until Mary and a couple of newfound friends (D.J. Qualls and Katy Mixon) head for Galveston in a '76 Gremlin.

We know from recent experience that stymied, obsessive love can be a delightful basis for romantic comedy, but All About Steve hasn't anything like the melting heart of (500) Days of Summer. There's no footing in reality. Nothing about it feels authentic: not the blathering Mary, not the lifeless secondary characters, not the bromide-happy dialogue or the plot that twists less often than it spasms. Among the many eye-rolling absurdities are bonehead emergency workers who can't even count. Journalists are almost always portrayed as boobs, but firefighters? Really? (Also: If you see the film, maybe you can explain to me why no one uses a rope.)

Twice for our benefit, Mary lists the elements of any successful crossword, and they aren't that different from the keys to a decent movie. The pertinent questions are: “Is it solvable? Is it entertaining? Does it sparkle?” The answers are: No, no, and no.